Born to Good Luck, The journey of a self-made man
“See here, Dick Armstrong; when you’ve taken that water into the house, I want you to clean these. Do you understand?”
The speaker, a sallow-complexioned, overgrown boy of seventeen, threw a pair of mud-bespattered boots at the feet of a sun-burned, healthy-looking lad about a year his junior, while a grin of satisfied malice wrinkled his not over-pleasant features as he thrust his hands into his pockets and started to walk away.
“Who are you talking to, Luke Maslin?” answered Dick, hotly, not relishing the contemptuous manner in which he had been addressed.
“Why, you, of course,” replied Luke, with a sneer, pausing about a yard away. “You’re dad’s boy-of-all-work, aren’t you?”
Unfortunately for Dick this remark expressed the exact truth.
He was Silas Maslin’s boy-of-all-work, and his lot was not an enviable one.
His clothes were bad, his food scarce, his education neglected, and having arrived at the age of sixteen years he eagerly longed to cut loose from his uncongenial surroundings and make his own way in the world.
If Dick felt obliged to submit to Mr. Maslin’s tyrannical treatment, that was no reason, he contended, why he should allow his son Luke to bully him also.
Although he had never done anything to deserve Luke Maslin’s ill will and often went out of his way to do him a good turn, Luke never lost a chance to make life miserable for Dick.
In fact, all friendly advances on Armstrong’s part, instead of winning his favor, seemed rather to impress him with the idea that Dick was afraid of him, which was far from the truth.
On this particular occasion Dick was not in the best of humor, for Mr. Maslin had just been savagely abusing him because he had taken a longer time than the old man had considered necessary to fetch certain supplies for the store from Slocum, a large town about ten miles distant. So when Luke flung the last remark at him he angrily retorted
james_limi · Politique et sciences sociales
